Darren Waller

Yeah, no, it's an honor to be here.

First 14, 15 years?

I grew up 30 minutes north of Atlanta, Georgia.

Uh, my parents, my dad's from Queens, New York.

My mom is from, uh, Maryland area.

Uh, and I was born in DC and we moved to Colorado when I was young and we moved to Georgia right before I turned five.

So that's pretty much all I remember.

Uh, I had both parents in the home, parents still together.

I had an older sister.

Um,

And, you know, on paper, it's great childhood, great area we grew up in, great schools.

But, you know, learning more and looking back on my life as I've gone forward, you know, both my parents came from addictive households.

And so for them, I think they did a tremendous job with my sister and I. And I think they had experiences where they grew up where it was like, man, we want to do this.

give our kids the opposite of what we may have had to experience and uh in doing that i think they did a great job of like teaching us how to communicate and uh be good in school and present well and have manners and be respectful to other people but in some ways i don't think they anticipated um because i don't think they would have known either that it kind of turned us into uh

performers like it paid off like my football career and um and things like that but in a lot of ways it just uh made me um I don't know very like hyper vigilant of like wanting to please people and um not wanting to you know feel like rejection and things like that and I had some you know rejection kind of things going on early on like I remember being in social environments around

School, people my age, very early on, and it was always like I was a little bit more sensitive and a little, you know, I was black, but I didn't act black.

And, you know, I was, I guess, like advanced as far as school comes, like gifted or whatever.

And I was often one of the only black kids in my classes and things like that.

So everywhere I went, I kind of felt like I didn't necessarily fit in.

Yeah, yeah.